WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The outgoing head of the Internal Revenue Service acknowledged on Friday that the tax agency planned its initial disclosure about having targeted conservative groups through a planted question at a lawyers' conference.
Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller told lawmakers during a Capitol Hill hearing that the question-and-answer session that exposed the tax agency's targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny had been carefully planned.
"It was a prepared Q and A," Miller said when asked about IRS official Lois Lerner's response to a question from a lobbyist at an American Bar Association conference last week.
When pressed whether the question was planted in advance, Miller said, "I believe that we talked about that, yes."
Miller did not elaborate on why the IRS chose such a strategy to reveal what has become a scandal over whether the tax agency treated some conservative groups fairly.
Miller was fired on Wednesday as the White House sought to stem criticism over the IRS matter. On Thursday, Obama chose White House budget official Daniel Werfel to replace Miller as acting commissioner.
(Reporting By Susan Heavey and Laura MacInnis; Editing by David Lindsey and Jackie Frank)
MADRID (AP) ? A Dutch citizen arrested in Spain on suspicion of launching what authorities have called the biggest cyberattack in Internet history is expected to be handed over to the Netherlands within 10 days, a Spanish court official said Monday.
The suspect ? identified only by his initials S.K. ? was questioned Saturday in the National Court in Madrid after his arrest last week and agreed to the deal, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because court rules prevent him from giving his name.
Police say the 35-year-old suspect operated from a bunker in northeast Spain and also had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country. He was arrested Thursday in Granollers, 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Barcelona.
He is accused of attacking the anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus, whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills reaching the world's inboxes.
Dutch authorities alerted Spanish police in March of large denial-of-service attacks being launched from Spain that were affecting Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the U.S. These attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.
Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, jamming it with incoming messages. Recent cyberattacks ? such as the ones that caused outages at U.S. banking sites last year ? have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second. The attack on Spamhaus was three times that size.
Police from the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Spain and the U.S. took part in the investigation.
Apr. 29, 2013 ? Compulsive gamblers suffer from an optimism bias that modifies their subjective representation of probability and affects their decisions in situations involving high-risk monetary wagers. This is the conclusion drawn by Jean-Claude Dreher's research team at the CNC (Centre de Neurosciences Cognitives, CNRS / Universit? Claude Bernard Lyon 1). These findings, published in the May print edition of Psychological Medicine, could help explain and anticipate certain individuals' vulnerability to gambling, and could lead to new therapeutic approaches.
A growing number of gamblers suffer from pathological gambling, a disease that is usually characterized as either a loss of impulse control or a behavioral addiction. It results in an inability to limit the frequency of gambling and the amount of money wagered. This increasingly common psychiatric disorder creates financial, professional and personal hardships that can have severe consequences for the patients and the people around them. The mechanisms responsible for its emergence and development remain largely unknown, which limits the clinician's ability to proceed with a diagnosis, prognosis or effective treatment for this condition.
In this study, the researchers set out to test and verify the hypothesis that links pathological gambling to an alteration of probabilistic reasoning. The capacity to reason in probabilistic terms appears only at an advanced stage of human intellectual development (in fact, the basic concept of probability is not fully understood until the age of 11 or 12). Pioneering research in the late 1970s had already shed light on the difficulties that people experience in situations involving risk or uncertainty. These difficulties are reflected in the development and perpetuation in adults of cognitive biases1 specific to probabilistic decision-making, one of the most common being probability distortion (2).
The researchers conducted an experiment on compulsive gambling patients using a standard experimental economics task and a mathematical model for measuring both probability distortion and a more general optimism bias in relation to high-risk bets. The primary result obtained confirms the general hypothesis of a distortion, associated with pathological gambling, in the subjective representation of probabilities. The results also show that the compulsion to gamble is not explained by an exaggerated distortion of probability, but rather by an increased optimism bias. In other words, regardless of the objective probability of winning a high-risk bet, gamblers tend to act as though this probability were greater than it actually is. The researchers also observed that in the patient population under study, the intensity of this bias was significantly correlated to the severity of the symptoms.
For clinical psychiatrists, the simplicity of the procedure used to reach this conclusion could offer a rapid and reliable way of measuring the representation of probability, thus allowing them to refine both their diagnoses and therapeutic decisions. This study raises many new questions for researchers in the cognitive neurosciences: how does the brain represent the probability of winning? How do the cerebral structures responsible for this representation interact with the structures involved in the development and perpetuation of an addiction? Is a pathological gambler's particular relationship to probability accompanied by an increased sensitivity to reward and/or insensitivity to monetary loss? These important questions are now being investigated at the CNC.
(1) Internal or external influence causing an alteration of human judgment or perception.
(2) Identified by the Nobel laureates Kahneman and Tversky in 1979, probability distortion is characterized by the overestimation of low probabilities and underestimation of high probabilities.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CNRS (D?l?gation Paris Michel-Ange).
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Journal Reference:
R. Ligneul, G. Sescousse, G. Barbalat, P. Domenech, J.-C. Dreher. Shifted risk preferences in pathological gambling. Psychological Medicine, 2012; 43 (05): 1059 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712001900
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Grocery delivery service is greener than driving to the storePublic release date: 29-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Michelle Ma mcma@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
At the end of a long day, it can be more convenient to order your groceries online while sitting on the living room couch instead of making a late-night run to the store. New research shows it's also much more environmentally friendly to leave the car parked and opt for groceries delivered to your doorstep.
University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions.
"A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn't the case here," said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions."
Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway's service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle.
As companies continue to weigh the costs and benefits of offering a delivery service, Goodchild and Erica Wygonik, a UW doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering, looked at whether using a grocery delivery service was better for the environment, with Seattle as a test case. In their analysis, they found delivery service trucks produced 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than the corresponding personal vehicles driven to and from a grocery store.
They also discovered significant savings for companies 80 to 90 percent less carbon dioxide emitted if they delivered based on routes that clustered customers together, instead of catering to individual household requests for specific delivery times.
"What's good for the bottom line of the delivery service provider is generally going to be good for the environment, because fuel is such a big contributor to operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions," Wygonik said. "Saving fuel saves money, which also saves on emissions."
The research was funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation and published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.
The UW researchers compiled Seattle and King County data, assuming that every household was a possible delivery-service customer. Then, they randomly drew a portion of those households from that data to identify customers and assign them to their closest grocery store. This allowed them to reach across the entire city, without bias toward factors such as demographics and income level.
They used an Environmental Protection Agency modeling tool to calculate emissions at a much more detailed level than previous studies have done. Using factors such as vehicle type, speed and roadway type, they calculated the carbon dioxide produced for every mile for every vehicle.
Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.
"We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well," Wygonik said.
Work commuters are offered a number of incentives to reduce traffic on the roads through discounted transit fares, vanpools and carpooling options. Given the emissions reductions possible through grocery delivery services, the research raises the question of whether government or industry leaders should consider incentives for consumers to order their groceries online and save on trips to the store, Goodchild said.
In the future, Goodchild and Wygonik plan to look at the influence of customers combining their grocery shopping with a work commute trip and the impact of the delivery service's home-base location on emissions.
###
For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu or 206-543-3747.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Grocery delivery service is greener than driving to the storePublic release date: 29-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Michelle Ma mcma@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
At the end of a long day, it can be more convenient to order your groceries online while sitting on the living room couch instead of making a late-night run to the store. New research shows it's also much more environmentally friendly to leave the car parked and opt for groceries delivered to your doorstep.
University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions.
"A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn't the case here," said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions."
Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway's service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle.
As companies continue to weigh the costs and benefits of offering a delivery service, Goodchild and Erica Wygonik, a UW doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering, looked at whether using a grocery delivery service was better for the environment, with Seattle as a test case. In their analysis, they found delivery service trucks produced 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than the corresponding personal vehicles driven to and from a grocery store.
They also discovered significant savings for companies 80 to 90 percent less carbon dioxide emitted if they delivered based on routes that clustered customers together, instead of catering to individual household requests for specific delivery times.
"What's good for the bottom line of the delivery service provider is generally going to be good for the environment, because fuel is such a big contributor to operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions," Wygonik said. "Saving fuel saves money, which also saves on emissions."
The research was funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation and published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.
The UW researchers compiled Seattle and King County data, assuming that every household was a possible delivery-service customer. Then, they randomly drew a portion of those households from that data to identify customers and assign them to their closest grocery store. This allowed them to reach across the entire city, without bias toward factors such as demographics and income level.
They used an Environmental Protection Agency modeling tool to calculate emissions at a much more detailed level than previous studies have done. Using factors such as vehicle type, speed and roadway type, they calculated the carbon dioxide produced for every mile for every vehicle.
Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.
"We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well," Wygonik said.
Work commuters are offered a number of incentives to reduce traffic on the roads through discounted transit fares, vanpools and carpooling options. Given the emissions reductions possible through grocery delivery services, the research raises the question of whether government or industry leaders should consider incentives for consumers to order their groceries online and save on trips to the store, Goodchild said.
In the future, Goodchild and Wygonik plan to look at the influence of customers combining their grocery shopping with a work commute trip and the impact of the delivery service's home-base location on emissions.
###
For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu or 206-543-3747.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Apr. 28, 2013 ? s living in areas near natural gas operations, also known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, are concerned their illnesses may be a result of nearby drilling operations. Twenty-two percent of the participants in a small pilot study surmise that hydrofracking may be the cause of such health concerns as sinus problems, sleeping difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems.
The findings will be presented at the American Occupational Health Conference on April 28 in Orlando, Florida.
Scientists collected responses from 72 adults visiting a primary care physician's office in the hydrofracking-heavy area of Bradford County, Pa., who volunteered to complete an investigator-faciliated survey.
"Almost a quarter of participants consider natural gas operations to be a contributor to their health issues, indicating that there is clearly a concern among residents that should be addressed," says Poun? Saberi, MD, MPH, the study's principal investigator with the department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She is also an investigator with the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET) at Penn.
Within these 22 percent of responders, 13 percent viewed drilling to be the cause of their current health complaints and 9 percent were concerned that future health problems can be caused by natural gas operations. The previous health complaints by participants were thought to be anecdotal in nature as they were individual cases reported publicly only by popular media.
"What is significant about this study is that the prevalence of impressions about medical symptoms attributed to natural gas operations had not been previously solicited in Pennsylvania. This survey indicates that there is a larger group of people with health concerns than originally assumed," explains Saberi.
The survey included questions about 29 health symptoms, including those previously anecdotally reported by other residents and workers in other areas where drilling occurs. Some patient medical records were also reviewed to compare reported symptoms with those that had been previously documented. "Sinus problems, sleeping difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems were the most common symptoms reported on the Bradford survey," notes Saberi. "Of the few studied charts, there were no one-to-one correlations between the participants' reported symptoms on the survey and the presenting symptom to the medical provider in the records. This raises the possibility of communication gaps between residents with concerns and the medical community and needs further exploration. An opportunity exists to educate shale region communities and workers to report, as well as health care providers to document, the attributed symptoms as precisely as possible."
The CEET team also mapped the addresses of patients who agreed to provide them in relation to drilling to determine if proximity to drilling operations may relate to health problems.
"We hope this pilot study will guide the development of future epidemiological studies to determine whether health effects in communities in which natural gas operations are occurring is associated with air, water, and food-shed exposures and will provide a basis for health care provider education," says CEET director Trevor Penning, PhD. "The goal of science should be to protect the public and the environment before harm occurs; not simply to treat it after the damage has been done."
The Bradford County health concerns pilot study is one of three hydrofracking studies currently underway at CEET, one of 20 Environmental Health Sciences Core Centers (EHSCC) in the US, funded by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
CEET is also partnering with Columbia University's EHSCC to measure water quality and billable health outcomes in areas with and without hydrofracking on the Pennsylvania-New York border. Using a new mapping tool developed by Harvard University, CEET and Harvard researchers are creating maps of drilling sites, air quality, water quality, and health effects to locate possible associations. Initial studies will focus on Pennsylvania. Results of both studies are expected in early 2014. These collaborative studies are funded by pilot project funds from the respective EHSCCs, which in turn obtain their financial support from NIEHS.
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OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) ? After struggling to sway both state and federal lawmakers, proponents of expanding background checks for gun sales are now exploring whether they will have more success by taking the issue directly to voters.
While advocates generally prefer that new gun laws be passed through the legislative process, especially at the national level, they are also concerned about how much sway the National Rifle Association has with lawmakers. Washington Rep. Jamie Pedersen, a Democrat who had sponsored unsuccessful legislation on background checks at the state level, said a winning ballot initiative would make a statement with broad implications.
"It's more powerful if the voters do it ? as opposed to our doing it," Pedersen said. "And it would make it easier for the Legislature to do even more."
On Monday, proponents of universal background checks in Washington will announce their plan to launch a statewide initiative campaign that would require the collection of some 300,000 signatures, according to a person involved in the initiative planning who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt the official announcement. The Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility has scheduled a fundraiser in Seattle at the end of next month and hopes to have a campaign budget in the millions of dollars.
Ballot measures may be an option elsewhere, too. Hildy Saizow, president of Arizonans for Gun Safety, said an initiative is one of the things the group will be considering as it reconsiders strategies. An organizer in Oregon was focused on the Legislature for now but wouldn't rule out a ballot measure in the future if lawmakers fail to pass a proposed bill there.
While advocates have had recent success on background checks in places like Connecticut and Colorado, they've been thwarted in some other states and in Congress. The U.S. Senate rejected a plan to expand background checks earlier this month, although lawmakers in the chamber are still working to gather additional votes.
Brian Malte, director of mobilization at the national nonprofit lobbying group Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said passage through Congress is the ideal in order to have a national solution and so that states with strong gun laws aren't undermined by nearby states with weaker standards. He noted that initiative campaigns are costly endeavors that can drain important, limited resources.
Still, Malte said, the ballot measures are an option to consider.
"At some point, certainly decisions need to be made about what the right time is to say we take it to the people," Malte said.
Brian Judy, a lobbyist who represents the NRA in Washington state, did not return calls seeking comment about the new initiative. He has previously said the NRA would likely oppose such an effort, arguing that the recently proposed laws on background checks would largely impact law-abiding citizens instead of the intended targets such as criminals and the mentally ill.
Gun measures have had mixed results at the ballot. More than 70 percent of Washington state voters rejected a 1997 initiative campaign that would have required handgun owners to pass a safety course. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, voters in Colorado and Oregon approved ballot measures the next year to require background checks for buying weapons at gun shows.
Following another massacre in Colorado earlier this year, state lawmakers approved a bill to expand background checks to private transactions and online purchases. A similar expansion plan in Oregon is stalled in the state Senate.
Some states don't see initiatives as a viable option right now. In Missouri, state Rep. Stacey Newman has been pushing for background checks with little success. While she spoke positively about the idea of a ballot initiative, she said there's no serious consideration of it because of the cost and coordination required just to get it on the ballot. Instead, the supporters of background checks in the state are simply working to prevent NRA-supported legislation from passing the state's General Assembly.
"We're continually on defense," she said.
Gun buyers currently must undergo a background check when they purchase a weapon from a federally licensed firearms dealer but can avoid checks through private purchases or at some gun shows.
Washington state advocates believe polls show the public is sufficiently on the side of expanding background checks further. An independent Elway Poll conducted two months ago found that 79 percent of registered voters in Washington state supported background checks on all gun sales, including private transactions.
That wasn't enough to shepherd the bill through the Legislature. Even in the state House, which is controlled by Democrats, supporters fell short after an NRA campaign put pressure on some lawmakers. Pedersen had offered concessions through the process, including the option of sending the measure out for a public vote and exemptions for people who already have concealed pistol licenses or law enforcement credentials.
Pedersen said he was working with the initiative organizers on language for the proposal, and he said the Legislature would first have another chance to adopt the measure early next year. If it fails among lawmakers again, the proposal would then automatically go to the ballot, where Pedersen said he welcomed a campaign competing against groups like the NRA.
"I'm not afraid of it at all," Pedersen said. "The public is really with us. It's the right policy. I think it can be useful for further progress."
___
AP Writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/HiPpEV
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Public release date: 29-Apr-2013
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